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Move a Skill to a Different Part of Your Brain

A few nights ago, I was having dinner with my friend J.D., and he mentioned a guy who could do complex mathematical calculations in his head. J.D. said when the guy was asked how he could do such amazing calculations so quickly, the guy answered that he used a different part of his brain for math than most people do.

The guy who can do this is Scott Flansburg, aka “The Human Calculator,” and he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records. He can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square roots, and cube roots in his head as well as a calculator. An fMRI scan showed that while doing complex calculations, Flansburg’s brain was silent in the area most people would use for mathematics, but activity surged in a nearby but different part of his brain.

This idea got me curious. Could we do this consciously? Could we deliberately move a skill from one part of our brains to another region, where the skill may gain a significant performance boost? Is that possible?

We know that different regions of the brain are wired differently. Some of this specialization is coded into our genes, and the rest is trained through sensory input and experience. Different regions have different strengths and weaknesses.

The visual cortex handles image processing. The auditory cortex processes sound. The motor cortex coordinates movement. These areas of the brain have had millions of years to evolve and self-optimize because visual imagery, sounds, and movement have been available for all of that time. The brain is capable of dealing with new situations, but for many modern types of input, it hasn’t had sufficient time to evolve the optimal brain structures.

How does the brain know where to store your social media skills? Where does it allocate neurons for texting? What about playing video games? Running an online business? Writing software?

Many of the modern skills we rely on today haven’t had the time to develop specialized brain regions. That’s partly why they require more effort. Seeing, hearing, and moving around are largely effortless once we’ve done some basic training. We don’t have to consciously think about edge detection, frequency identification, or any other aspects of those skills. Can you imagine how much mental effort it would take to consciously perform all the details of image and sound processing? How complicated would it be to move around if we had to consciously direct the specific contractions of every muscle?

Some of our modern skills align reasonably well with our evolved strengths. Driving a car is one example, which involves coordinating the movements from the motor cortex with the data from the visual cortex and auditory cortex. Driving must also connect with brain regions that assign meaning, such as knowing that it’s bad to hit a pedestrian or another vehicle. With enough practice, we can train this skill so it becomes largely subconscious.

Whenever we learn a new skill, your brain must decide where to store that skill. Many skills span multiple regions of the brain, but within those regions, they still get assigned to specific areas. The brain will of course make these assignments on its own, but can you always trust that it made the right choice? What if it chooses a suboptimal region for storing a skill? Then you’d constantly struggle to apply that skill, using a part of the brain that isn’t well suited for it.

Perhaps when we say that someone is a natural at a skill, it may be because that person’s brain chose a better than usual area for housing that skill.

Where does the brain store business skills?

What about the skills involved in running a business? How does the brain know where to store those skills? Does it store them in the same regions for everyone? Certainly not. Having met many other business owners, it seems clear to me that different people process their business skills very differently.

As I think about my own past, I realize there were some key inflection points where I (unknowingly) shifted my business thinking to a different part of my brain, and my results changed dramatically each time I did so.

When I first started in business in 1994, I thought about business in a mostly calculating and algorithmic way. I processed business problems like a computer programming problem. To me business was another form of code. I set goals. I created plans to achieve those goals. I turned the plans into action steps. I did the action steps. For some businesses that might be fine. For mine it was a disaster because I was blindsided by the social side of business. I entered into deals with people who were dishonest or incompetent. I endured a lot of stress which dragged me down. Approaching business as a computer programmer didn’t go well for me. Five years after I started, I went bankrupt.

That led me to the first major inflection point. In 1999 I stopped thinking about business in such procedural terms. I reframed it as a form of play. I began thinking about my work as exploration and art instead of math and science. I thought of myself as a creator more than a problem solver. This reframe got me thinking in different directions and creating different products. In less than a year, the business was doing well, and in all the years since then, making money has never been difficult for me.

By shifting my business thinking into the parts of my brain associated with fun, playfulness, and creativity, I radically changed the way I worked. I stopped seeing money as being so important. It was like Monopoly money to me, just another plaything but nothing that I should treat with too much seriousness. I began doing things I’d never tried before, like volunteering for a nonprofit trade association and writing articles to help would-be competitors. If business is play, then competitors are just playmates, so even if we technically compete in some areas, the point is to have fun together.

Years later, I hit another inflection point. I kept the play aspect, but I moved much of my thinking about business into a more social part of my brain. I stopped thinking of the people I worked with as customers or clients. I began thinking of them as friends instead. This shift was more gradual, happening roughly between 2007 and 2010. I was active in social media during those years, including running some popular discussion forums. I also began doing in-person meetups, professional speaking, and public workshops during that time. I wasn’t just working from my computer anymore. The people I served were no longer stats in my web traffic logs or emails in my inbox. They became real human beings with whom I shared conversations, laughter, hugs, etc.

This shift in mindset caused me to make different business decisions. In 2008 I dropped all third-party advertising from my website, even though I was earning $12-13K per month in passive income from it. In 2010 I uncopyrighted all my blog posts, podcasts, and videos and donated them to the public domain, including all the new online content I’ve created since then. A lot of people thought I was crazy, but it was a natural consequence of processing business decisions through a different part of my brain. Why remove the ads? Because people don’t like ads. I wouldn’t show ads to my friends, would I? Why uncopyright? To make it easier for my friends to share and because it attracts even more friends.

To this day I continue to see my business through the lenses of friendship and play. This causes me to make different decisions and to get different results than other entrepreneurs would.

I don’t care much about money or profits, except to the extent that I treat it like a game. Money is still just a plaything. I’m also very sensitive to how I earn it. It doesn’t feel right to try to squeeze extra money out of friends. It doesn’t feel right to make money from advertising that would be shown to my friends. It does feel right to care about my friends, to be generous with them, to treat them like real human beings, and to ask for some help and support when I need it.

If you’ve been to one of my workshops, you’ve seen this mindset in action. On the morning of the first day, I greet people at the registration table. The staff and I hug everyone we can. Attendees hug each other. There are warm smiles everywhere. Why? Because we’re all friends. The workshop is a place for us to come together, have fun, and help each other grow. When I speak, it’s usually in an informal and conversational style. We joke around a lot. There’s an abundance of spontaneity and humor. Sometimes it takes people a day to warm up to this environment if they aren’t used to it (or if they’ve been to too many cold Internet marketing events where everyone keeps to themselves), but the vast majority of people love it once they get used to it and realize it’s all genuine. Afterwards we often see people changing their flights to continue hanging out together because they don’t want to leave.

This may be an odd way to frame business decisions, but I like it. I think the main reason it works so well is that it keeps my motivation high. My business world is full of friends, hugs, caring, encouragement, curiosity, learning, growth, travel, adventure, laughter, silliness, stimulation, and a little sluttiness. It’s fun, light-hearted, and warm. Because of these factors, my intrinsic motivation to work is very high. I don’t usually have to push myself or discipline myself to work, as long as I keep processing my business through the fun and social parts of my brain.

Over time this has also shifted the types of business partners I work with. These days it’s difficult for me to connect with people who process business in a cold and calculating way. It’s hard to relate to entrepreneurs who don’t have warm squishy feelings towards their customers and only see them as means to an end. That type of framework was a disaster for me, and I have no desire to return to it.

Financially my main goal is sustainability. I don’t feel a strong desire to grow my business bigger and bigger. I don’t need to make more money than I’m already making; I could even make less and be okay with it. I’m very happy with how things are, and so my main interest going forward is to keep improving the social side of the business, regardless of whether it makes money or not. I love the flow of meeting so many interesting people.

I shared this example because I believe we can consciously shift certain skills from one part of the brain to another, thereby creating a radical change in results. I don’t know how to shift my math coprocessor into the region that Scott Flansburg uses, but I have seen that I can do this with other skills by deliberately thinking about them from a different angle than usual.

Reframing to eliminate fear

We can also shift skills in ways that reduce fear and anxiety, so we can feel relaxed instead of tense as we apply these skills.

Many people are deathly afraid of public speaking. I used to have such a fear many years ago, and I eliminated that fear by changing the way I thought about it, much like I did for my business.

I used to frame public speaking as a performance. If you’re performing, you’re supposed to do everything right. Mistakes are bad. You’re being judged. Screwing up makes you look bad. Performing at your best makes you look good. When you step off the stage, you’ll feel delighted or disappointed based on how well you performed.

I found that even world champions of public speaking would still get nervous before speaking if they framed it as a performance. One of my friends said he can’t even eat before an event because otherwise he’ll throw up, and he must have at least 100x the stage time that I have.

Instead of seeing it as a performance, I frame public speaking as a conversation with friends. Even if I don’t know many people in the room, I imagine that we’re all good friends. The room is filled with people who like me, and I like them. Because they’re my friends, they want me to do well. Because they’re my friends, I care about them and they care about me. Because they’re my friends, I can lean on them for support whenever I need to. Mistakes don’t mean much because we’re just having a conversation, and my friends are forgiving. We’re going to have a good time together because we’re friends.

When I speak my leverage doesn’t come from my speaking skills, my knowledge, my experience, or my persuasive abilities. My leverage comes from caring. Caring about the people in the room is easier than performing perfectly, and so I relax more because I know I can handle the caring part, especially if I’ve already hugged a lot of people first. Since I’m more relaxed, I feel more comfortable, and I can access my inner resources, including my knowledge and skills, more easily. So the irony is that by focusing on caring instead of performance, I perform better anyway, and the performance side is more spontaneous and fun.

People can tell when a speaker is stuck in his/her head. You can feel the disconnect in the room when a speaker acts like a stage robot, giving an overly rehearsed presentation where the audience doesn’t seem to matter. When the speaker is warm and connected, you can feel that as well. Those latter speakers are the ones I wanted to model. When I talked to some of them, I learned that they didn’t see speaking as a performance. They see speaking as an expression of love and caring, a chance to connect with friends, or even a spiritual experience. It’s definitely not a performance.

Whenever you do a reframe like this, however, you may lose some of the strengths of the old frame. The speakers who frame speaking as a performance are usually more eloquent. They choose their words carefully. Their stories are polished because they’ve rehearsed those stories dozens of times. They can still get really good at speaking this way, even when they sweat all over the stage. It’s a tense type of performance though, and some of them have to use techniques to help them relax more before they go on stage.

When shifting to a conversational and friendship-based model, it’s hard to be as eloquent since it doesn’t seem so important. Do you worry about being eloquent when having coffee with a friend? I suppose you could, but you’re probably more focused on the connection. Having used both models, I prefer the friendship model. If I were to try to compete in a speech contest this way, I’d lose, but when I do my own workshops, people give them overwhelmingly positive feedback afterwards, especially at the last workshop (Conscious Heart Workshop) where there was no pre-planned content, and we just went with the flow of inspiration and spontaneity for three days straight. I’m going to keep using this part of my brain for public speaking, instead of the performance-minded part, because I’m pleased with the results it creates for myself and others.

Using reframing to link brain regions

The way you frame your skills can change which regions of the brain get involved. And using different regions to process a skill can radically change your ability to apply that skill, your learning curve, your motivation, your enjoyment, etc.

Now you may be wondering… can we get the best of both worlds here? Can we use the performance part and the social part at the same time? I’m not sure, but I think it may be possible with some effort. For me it really feels like I’m using two different circuits, but over time it may be possible to weave them together more.

Taking the public speaking example, how can we link performance and friendship? I suppose we could say that if you really care about your friends, you should want to get better at helping, supporting, and encouraging them. It’s not really a performance though. It’s about doing your best. If you can deepen your feelings of caring, that may be one pathway to improving your skills.

Another pathway would be to link through play. Some performing can also be regarded as play. Take sports for example. And friendship can involve play as well. We can link performance and friendship with teamwork and camaraderie. Frame it like bonding through sports. So instead of just trying to perform well as an individual, the focus is on improving the team’s performance as a whole. When I think about this, it aligns well with how I made this shift in public speaking, but instead of doing it with the audience, I did it with fellow speakers. The other speakers I knew were my teammates, and we were all trying to help each other perform better. That made speaking more fun, but it still had a competitive aspect to it. But what if we shift to seeing the audience and speaker as being on the same team too? Then we have a model of the speaker being like a coach. A good coach performs well as a strategist, and a good coach also cares. When you want to relax and connect more, lean towards the caring side of coaching. When you want to improve your performance, lean towards the strategic aspect of coaching.

I like using the explorer frame. A good explorer goes out and explores a lot. A good explorer also shares his/her explorations for the benefit of others. This is how I link learning and writing/speaking, so I don’t get stuck in one mode or the other indefinitely.

I’m sure there are other ways to create links as well. You can certainly do a lot of experimenting here to find models that works well for you. If you can find a singular reframe that links multiple thinking styles together (like the coach andexplorer examples), it simplifies your thinking and makes it easier to access your best inner resources.

Reframing relationships

Where do we store our relationships? Our brains have evolved over a long enough period of time that we actually have dedicated social circuitry to help manage our social connections. For instance, we’re geniuses when it comes to facial recognition. Even so, we still have some leeway regarding how we frame and process individual connections. The way we process a friend is different from how we process a stranger or an enemy. Experiments have shown that even simple reframes can radically change the way we socially interact with others. Watch The Stanford Prison Experiment for an excellent example.

While writing this article, I paused to FaceTime with Rachelle (she’s currently in Costa Rica) about how we might frame our relationship with each other in unusual ways by associating it with regions of the brain not necessarily devoted to socialization. She said she feels like I’m connected to the part of her brain associated with her old teddy bear, and those feelings get activated when we cuddle. I smiled at that.

I told Rachelle that when I look at her, I often feel like I’m looking at a decadent dessert. I realized that much of the sensual enjoyment I get from sharing affection with her is similar to what I’d feel while eating something sinfully delicious. She pointed out that this also aligns well with the long-distance aspect of our relationship since it wouldn’t be healthy to indulge in decadent desserts for too long without taking a break. Interesting…

I’ve noticed that many people who struggle to develop their social skills seem to approach the skill set very analytically. They approach relationships like they would a math or science problem, much like I tried to approach business in the beginning.What are the rules? What are the truths about human behavior that I need to know? What action steps do I take? What’s the algorithm for overcoming approach anxiety? What lines should I say? What are the properties of men and women that I need to know?

That approach usually doesn’t work well. At best it turns people into social robots who learn how to manipulate others. Either way they miss out on real intimacy. Such people are often described by others as being socially creepy.

The analytical, rules-based approach can get someone a lot of phone numbers, dates, and sex, but it’s difficult to have a relationship that lasts more than two weeks when people use this style of relating.

I grew up with pretty weak social skills and put a lot of time and energy into improving them over a period of many years. One of the most empowering shifts happened when I got into subjective reality, a powerful reframe in which you view all of reality as if it’s a dream. Other human beings became dream characters, and since we’re all characters in the same dream, we’re already connected. There’s no need to break the ice with anyone new since there are no strangers, and our individuality is largely an illusion. This helped a lot, especially in terms of taking more social risks. But it also takes a lot of practice, and it can be difficult to hold onto it while you’re in the middle of a conversation. It’s a great frame for quickly connecting deeply with people though.

A simpler reframe that I also found effective was to approach socializing as play. I find that good connections arise fairly easily when I’m in a playful mood. This avoids many of the problems that arise when people are being overly analytical, such as peppering the other person with questions interview-style, being uncertain about what to say next, or waiting to speak instead of actually listening. The goal of play, if there is a goal, is to create stimulation and have fun. This creates conversations that may weave through many topics and never really finish threads. Initially I thought that would be a bad thing, but the benefit of leaving lots of open loops is that it leaves both people feeling that they’d like to reconnect at a future date to continue the interesting discussion. It also creates stronger emotional bonds that make people want to get together again. If you complete a conversation by neatly closing every thread, you’ll often find there isn’t much desire to connect again.

Many people avoid taking social risks because they’re afraid of rejection, so it’s also important to have a positive way of framing rejection. For people to enjoy more social richness, they usually have to find a way to frame rejection such that they stop seeing it as a blow to their self-esteem. Most of the socially savvy people I know seem to do this by framing rejection as something impersonal, or they just assume the other person was having an off day. Some of them go through a period of rejection training, like deliberately going out and acquiring hundreds of rejections till they stop seeing it as a big deal. This essentially shifts rejection processing into a different part of the brain. The brain stops classifying rejection as a rare and scary event to be avoided, and it begins to classify rejection as a non-threatening, everyday occurrence — an empowering reframe. Some people even take this to the point that getting rejected becomes a silly form of entertainment.

Reframing to fit our natural strengths

We can also recognize when we’re drifting too far from our naturally evolved strengths, and we can recalibrate the way we manage parts of our lives to better align with those strengths.

One reason I withdrew from social media is that the massive amount of online interaction unbalanced my life too much. I felt that certain parts of my brain were starving for more activity during the years when I was doing a lot of online socializing. I wasn’t enjoying enough touch. I wasn’t hearing enough laughter. I was seeing too many smilies and too few smiles. I was spending too much time reading works on a screen and pushing buttons on a keyboard.

One reframe that helped me shift away from excessive online socializing is that I stopped seeing it as genuine socializing. I began framing it as a circular addiction — an endless treadmill of drivel. This is an overgeneralization of course, but it was a helpful one that enabled me to say goodbye to services where I had thousands of online followers without worrying about the potential consequences to my business. It’s been nearly two years since I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and my business has been just fine. I also feel less stressed and more relaxed since my other communication channels are easily manageable.

Our brains are nicely evolved to handle face to face interactions. We haven’t had time to develop dedicated circuitry for phone conversations, video conferences, and social media. We can develop these skills of course, but if you lean on them too heavily, you may find as I did that it feels like some parts of your brain are starving for more activity. You may feel social cravings that never seem to be satisfied. We can turn our backs on our neurology to some degree, but I think we can overdo that to our detriment. I’ve certainly felt a lot happier about my lifestyle with more face to face interaction and less online socializing.

Learning new skills

What about learning new skills? Can conscious reframing help us learn faster? I believe it can.

Earlier this month I went Trikke skiing with some friends. If you don’t know what Trikke skiing is, here’s a short video to show you what it looks like. You don’t have to watch the whole thing. Just skim through it until you have a sense of what it looks like.

I’d never done this before, so it was a new skill for me to learn. I’ve only gone skiing a few times ever, the last time being in 1989, and I was never much good at it. I could barely do the intermediate slope.

There were nine people in our group, including two instructors who are friends of mine. We went to Lee Canyon, which is about 45 minutes northwest of Las Vegas. It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, about 35 degrees when we started training on the beginner slope. They told us that by the afternoon, we’d probably be doing the expert slope. I could see the expert slope from where we were standing, and it looked pretty steep. It was hard to believe we’d be doing that slope in only a few hours.

We spent about an hour on the beginner slope, and I took a hard fall while trying to figure out how to turn. I caught the front edge of the skis on the downward slope, so my Trikke stopped abruptly while I went flying off downhill. I landed hard on my side and got the wind knocked out of me. When I stood up, I felt a bit dizzy. The upside was that this gained me some extra coaching, so I wouldn’t make that mistake again — and fortunately I didn’t.

After about an hour there, we spent another hour or so on the intermediate slope. I had two more minor falls there. One fall happened when I spun around and started going backwards. Another fall happened when I didn’t slow down soon enough as I hit the powdery snow at the bottom of the slope, and I went flying off sideways. Fortunately it was a soft landing.

I seemed to struggle the most on the beginner slope. I was framing the experience as fun, play, and social, and I wasn’t too worried about getting hurt. I still paid attention and wanted to learn, but I felt more relaxed and excited going into it, not as tense as I think some of the other students were. Tension, however, probably wasn’t such a bad thing in the beginning. Because I was there to have fun, I probably went a bit faster in the beginning than I should have. I tried to do too many things at once. My excitement was ahead of my skill.

In order to gain the skill set, I had to slow down and narrow my focus. I had to focus on learning one piece of the skill set at a time, not on the fun, play, and social aspects. With the help of the instructors, who were awesome, I took the learning process step by step: how to use my legs correctly, how to use my arms, how to lean, how to turn, how to slow down, how to stop, and how to avoid spinning around and going backwards. Then I could add more complex skills like how to handle bumps, how to correct from fishtailing, how to mentally plot my turns in advance, and how to safely avoid other skiers and snowboarders. With this mindset, it only took about one more hour, maybe 90 minutes, to achieve basic competence at all of these skills. Once my body learned them, I could trust that it would do the right thing automatically.

Once I had the basic skills down, I was then able to shift back into framing the experience as fun, play, and social. We spent the last few hours on the expert slope, and by that time I could relax, have fun, and enjoy the skill. I let my subconscious handle the movements while I whizzed down the slope at high speed. I loved going fast down the slope, and one of the other guys in our group called me a speed demon. It was thrilling and exhilarating, and I had a lot of fun that afternoon. I kept going up the lift and down the slope till my legs were mush and I could barely stand.

The other students had varying experiences, and I think their results largely depended on how they framed the learning process as they went along. Some, like me, were having lots of fun at the end. Others were struggling and falling a lot on the expert slope, even on the verge of quitting, till they got some extra coaching. By this time, the coaching had less to do with the physical skill and more to do with reframing the experience to create less tension and anxiety. While being cautious and a little anxious could be helpful on the beginner slope by preventing mistakes, it was detrimental on the expert slope, where it was more important to relax, go with the flow, and trust your body to make the right movements automatically.

As I looked back on the day, I could hardly believe how quickly we all picked up this skill, going from total newbies to speeding down the expert slope in a matter of hours. I think a large part of that involved engaging the correct parts of the brain at the right times: first the cautious listener, then the curious student, and then the fun-loving daredevil. Usually I find that the fun-loving daredevil serves me well even at the beginning of learning a new skill because it puts me in a playful mood where I’m not afraid of making mistakes. This time I learned that a more cautious frame may be more useful in some situations, such as by preventing injuries.

Incidentally, if you’re coming to Vegas and want to try Trikke skiing for yourself (during the winter of course) or take a fun motorized Trikke tour of downtown Vegas (any time of year), pop over to Trikke Las Vegas. It’s a great way to learn a new skill in a few hours. People often do these tours when going to our Vegas workshops too. The new venue where we’ll be hosting events is only a block from where the Trikke tours start, and speeding around downtown on these three-wheeled vehicles is a lot of fun.

Conscious reframing

Think about a skill set where you’ve been struggling to get results. Have you been struggling to build a business? To create financial abundance? To attract a relationship? To increase your productivity?

How are you currently framing this area of struggle? How would you describe your current approach? Which circuits are you using the most? Are those circuits getting the job done? Or would some other part of your brain potentially be better suited to the task?

Much of the time when I see people getting stuck, they’re being too analytical and succumbing to analysis paralysis. They have grand goals and plans but can’t get into the flow of action and stay there. Then they try to discipline themselves to force themselves to take more action, which usually backfires and frustrates them even more.

Other times I see people getting stuck because they’re trying to be too spiritual and spending too much time on the woo-woo elliptical machine. They keep pedaling with their intentions, but they aren’t getting anywhere.

These are all pretty smart people, but they’re trying to solve problems using parts of their brains that aren’t well suited to the challenges facing them. They’d probably get significantly better results if they tried a completely different approach, one better suited to the problem at hand.

I too would love it if I could use the same tool for every problem. Wouldn’t that be so convenient? But perhaps our brains have specialized into different regions with different processing strengths because our world is filled with different types of challenges. Maybe there is no single approach that works every time.

The good news is that if we can muster some self-awareness, we can indeed shift the processing of some challenges to other parts of our brains, perhaps even parts that are smart enough to shred those challenges with ease. Simply reframing a problem to process it with a different part of your brain can take you from frustrated stagnation to abundant flow.

I think one of my worst patterns that has slowed me down in life was being willing to endure too much frustration while trying to force a solution in a way that wasn’t working. On many occasions I’ve tried too hard when my approach was wrong to begin with. When I finally gave up and surrendered, I felt some relief and relaxation. Then I stepped back and tried to approach the challenge in a totally different way, and that’s when I finally experienced a breakthrough, after which everything became so much easier.

When I tried to run my business analytically, the world of business shredded me. When I reframed business as play and art, I finally had a fun, creative, and profitable business. Making money became almost effortless; I almost couldn’t believe how easy it was because previously it had always been an uphill struggle. Then when I ran my business through the friendship circuits, it filled up with loving and supportive connections and tons of hugs. I love all those hugs!

But note that I still have the ability to lean on those analytical circuits when it’s intelligent to do so. And I still sometimes succumb to analysis paralysis. So keep in mind that when you test a reframe, you still have the ability to go back and use the old approach when it suits you. And even when it doesn’t suit you, you may still be tempted to lean on the familiar, even when it doesn’t actually work. Old habits die hard.

If you’ve experienced anything that aligns with what I’ve shared in this article, I’d love to hear about it. What kind of reframe did you experience, and how did it work out? Feel free to drop me a note via my contact form to let me know.